The theme is “Designing for the Networked City” and I’m excited that I’ll be there with two of my favourite geniuses Usman Haque (again!) and Kevin Slavin. Really looking forward to this – thanks to Rudy De Waele for the invite.

Time to list a few upcoming talks various members of the studio will be giving… Firstly, I’ll be giving a short talk alongside Usman Haque, Dan Hon and others on September 10th, at the PSFK London Conference.

I’m not entirely sure what I’m going to say yet, but I think it will include some nice videos, some dodgy microbiological metaphors and some thinking about product…

Just a quick note to say that Jack is in NYC today speaking at the IDEA conference.

It’s an amazing line-up, where he’ll be presenting BERG’s work alongside Paola Antonelli of MOMA, Perry Chen of Kickstarter, David Chang of Momofuku restaurants and… Kid Sister! Hopefully he will remember get her autograph for me.

People, places, time. The triumvirate of factors at play in mobile, social, locative services might be familiar at the surface level to designers and developers.

Our relationships to each other, the cities and places we inhabit and navigate have been transformed in the last few years by the technology, products and services that we have designed — but what about that last one of the three — time?

Using examples from the development of Dopplr.com and other services — alongside historical and science-fictional perspectives — Matt will explore what we might call “neochronometry” and illustrate some directions we could take as interaction designers to treat time as a material.

The long run to the turn of the millennium got us preoccupied with conclusions. The Internet is finally taken for granted. The iPhone is finally ubiquitous computing come true. Let’s think not of ends, but dawns: it’s not that we’re on the home straight of ubicomp, but the beginning of a century of smart matter. It’s not about fixing the Web, but making a springboard for new economies, new ways of creating, and new cultures.

The 21st century is a participatory culture, not a consumerist one. What does it mean when small teams can be responsible for world-size effects, on the same playing field as major corporations and government? We can look at the Web – breaking down publishing and consuming from day zero – for where we might be heading in a world bigger than we can really see, and we can look at design – playful and rational all at once – to help us figure out what to do when we get there.

You may recognise the themes from Scope which opened reboot11 (catch the video here) in which I spoke about the personal roots of the invention of culture… and also about million mile tomatoes, JFK, and the Moon.

I’ll build on these topics at Web Directions. The leverage small groups have now to invent and participate in culture is wonderful, and the Web is at the very front of that. We’re at the beginning of a complex, remarkable world of exciting possibilities and responsibilities both. I want to look up and take in those wide blue skies.

It’s also my first trip to Australia, so recommendations of things to do and people to see are much appreciated. I think I’ll be able to extend my trip to about a week after the conference itself, but let’s see what happens. It should be ace, and I hope to see you there.

I’m excited to be opening the final day of UX Week 2009 with an exploration of what we can learn from the Web about smart products.

Smart products bring their own design challenges. Internet-connected devices and plastic filled with electronics behave in unexpected ways: what does it means for a physical thing to side-load its behaviour, or for a toy to have its own presence in your social network? What we’ve learned about user experience on the Web is a great place to start: social software, adaptation, designing for action creating action — these are principles familiar on the Web, and still valuable when design is not on the screen but in your hands.

We’ve learned a lot in the recent couple years about designing when there are a lot of moving parts: software, plastic, mechanics, embedded electronics, multiple teams and languages, standards, component costs, fulfilment… it’s a lot to put together and still retain a focus on user experience, and user adaptation. There’s no single project where we’ve got it all right — but there are a load of lessons, and I want to share some of them.